It’s an interesting symposium where Selim walks us through the role of machine learning in today’s eCommerce experience optimization landscape. He explains how the use of machine learning can help brands optimize the experience of their target audience by offering relevant product/service recommendations, personalized services, etc., and further converting them into repeat and loyal customers.

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

Selim Soytemiz owns and drives the top line online sales numbers for Trend Micro ANZ. He leads a large team of professionals who develop and implement marketing, channel, and sales programs to create new business opportunities, resolve client issues, increase business revenue, and achieve market share goals. 

With nearly 20 years of professional experience, Salim has practically witnessed the growth of the eCommerce industry from nascency to its current form. Over the years, he has studied the impact of machine learning to predict how technology can enhance eCommerce activities and help businesses grow. 

Here’s a synopsis of this insightful session:

Understanding the current eCommerce scenario

An industry practically formulated two decades ago, today, it single-handedly pumps trillions of dollars into the global economy every year. As per Statista, in 2019, the global retail eCommerce sales stood at 3.53 billion US dollars compared to 1.33 US billion dollars in 2014. The industry has not only brought about a change in users’ buying behavior but transformed the entire retail ecosystem.

This has led to the birth of many new eCommerce trends such as image/video-driven interactive eCommerce, voice-based eCommerce, personal stylist-driven eCommerce, mobile retail shops, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and so on. eCommerce on ecosystems like WeChat, GO-JEK, etc. are also changing the way people shop.

Moreover, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has further acted as fuel for the industry. Revenue gains by Amazon and Alibaba over the past couple of months stand testimony to the industry’s rapid growth during the pandemic.

The challenge in front of eCommerce marketers, therefore, is how to personalize digital shopping experiences amidst so much turbulence, with so many dynamic factors in play like – COVID-19 impact on purchasing behaviors, newer trends in eCommerce mentioned above, and dealing with prospective as well as existing customers with both coming with separate preferences and knowledge sets.

Traditional marketing has brought us to point zero

Most traditional marketing approaches give us many options to explore, such as event-driven automation, use of dynamic content, time-based customer journeys, email nurturing, automated campaigns based on customer behavior, and so on. While they sure are effective and help retain and get new customers aboard, their viability comes with a big question mark in the current scenario, especially when the need of the hour is to deliver customised experiences. Hence, Salim calls this as ‘point zero.’ The point where businesses need to start afresh. 

To avoid coming back to square one every time, the veteran suggests that now is the time to modernize your marketing approaches and learn from industry giants like Amazon and Alibaba. Create new and powerful strategies, make fundamental changes, use new-age technologies like machine learning, and rethink the entire eCommerce landscape. One strategy that Selim advocates for making customers take notice of your products is by creating what he calls as the ‘hey moments’.

Creating “Hey” moments

The key to high conversions is not just to have a broad list of products or services and a website to display your offerings to your target audience, but about having a cognitive strategy that creates smart “Hey” moments that compel individuals to notice your products or services and make purchases.

Here’s an old, yet a classic example of how to create a “Hey Moment.”  Apple released its second iPod back in 2001.  While introducing the product to the world, Apple used a very smart marketing strategy. It crafted its entire campaign based on the popular 4Ps of marketing – product, price, place, and promotion. 

1. Product: A sleek white box no bigger than a deck of cards, packed with 5GB of music storage space and use of one-of-a-kind technology that gave people the power to store 1000 songs in their pocket.
2. Price: A premium pricing to differentiate the product from its competitors and highlight its superiority.
3. Place: Individuals could only buy the iPod from an Apple exclusive store. 
4. Promotion: Introducing the iPod in the market through product launch promotion events, in-store activities, word of mouth, billboards, television and print media ads, and much more.   

The approach used was clever. Steve Jobs, who was the CEO then, gave Apple’s target audience the exact information, served on a platter that compelled them to buy the iPod, and enjoy music on this newly introduced and revolutionary handy music player. The gadget, in no time, went on to become a worldwide sensation.

Besides using traditional marketing mediums, today it has become increasingly important for businesses to add new marketing channels like digital advertising (including social media, SEO, PPC, SEM, etc) to create hey moments and drive customer engagement. Moreover, making the most of technology like AI can significantly boost marketing efforts. One of the crucial elements required for creating these hey moments is data.

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

Leveraging visitor data

Research and data are two invaluable information assets without which businesses cannot strive for long. Each piece of information, such as visitor age, their location, time spent on a page, site/page engagement rate, etc, gathered through various approaches (including many marketing strategies), helps understand the target audience’s psychology. When used correctly, data has the prowess to help businesses craft state-of-the-art products and services and deliver excellent customer experiences. 

In fact, if you do not consider what your target audience needs or expects from your brand, you’re sure to fall back and lose out on a lot of potential conversions. So, leverage research and data to your advantage.    

Selim himself uses about 367 attributes at Trend Micro to understand the needs and demands of its new and current customers and regularly adds more attributes to the list to ensure he and his team do not miss out on even a single piece of visitor data. According to him, the more you know about the behavior of your prospects and customers, the better experiences you can create.

The problem statement – improving customer experiences by collecting, managing, and analyzing customer data is an extremely strenuous task when done manually.

Collecting massive amounts of data on a daily basis can be a highly daunting and intimidating task. No individual can spend hours everyday gathering and updating the same information in the systems, and still manage to enjoy their work, while ensuring that no mistakes are made. To  explain this claim, let’s consider  a hypothetical character named Adam, who is responsible for managing a marketing firm’s customer data.

Adam manually maps customer behaviors based on pre decided attributes, and daily updates the same set of information to ensure synchronicity. He finds new attributes that he can use to make specific changes to boost sales, retain existing customers, and even grow business. Adam also ensures that all his actions are geared towards making either the right decisions to increase sales or keep the line flat. 

He works a 9-5 job. If anything happens during his off-hours, he checks the variability the next day and takes action, especially if there’s a negative trend. Owing to his job’s taxing nature, it’s highly unlikely for Adam to continue  his work properly, not allow human errors to creep in due to disinterest, and continuously build new strategies around how to increase business revenue, for long. 

So, what’s the solution? Use technologies like machine learning to your advantage.

Bringing machine learning into your experience optimization process

Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses algorithms to provide systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve processes through experience. When fed with the right purpose, data, application rules, and boundaries, machine learning can effectively and efficiently deliver faster, more accurate results and achieve predefined end goals.

In comes Lily – a machine learning algorithm robot. Unlike Adam, she has the ability to work  24×7 and constantly learn as well. Lily operates on a predefined purpose, rules which she can modify or change as per her growing experience, and uses her built-up knowledge to achieve the set goal.

If Adam and Lily work in tandem, they can do wonders for their organization. While Lily has the ability to work 24×7 and constantly gather and update data, Adam can focus his energies on studying this data, find hiccups, and craft new and improved strategies to build a vast, loyal customer base. This in turn leads to happy customers with increased customer value, increased customer loyalty, and increased customer base.

The solution lies in using a combination of experience optimization expertise and machine learning to deliver personalization in eCommerce

Explaining the above concept in terms of eCommerce, machine learning can be used for optimizing and personalizing shopping experiences based on individual customer’s needs and enabling eCommerce businesses to benefit at large. 

Mentioned below are some ways in which Lily or machine learning helps eCommerce businesses run smoothly. Lily does the below most efficiently:

• creates offers, price points, and does the page positioning of goods and services
• tries button colors, changes heading of the product offers
• welcome customers
• pops up coupon codes 
• shows or hides certain up-sell or cross-sell products based on distraction
• feeds data back to the advertising machine learning engine
• retargets customers and follows them 
• forms and shapes the offers based on their activities on third-party websites
• receives all the data and reshapes the pages again
• sends emails and push notifications 
• learns about a customer’s habits
• measures all aspects of customer behavior patterns and modifies the page using sets of rules
• keeps all changes in the boundaries set by humans
• senses the success with constant reporting from payment gateways, and knows the goal
• checks results, learns, and adjusts herself  

Improved buying behavior owing to the machine learning capabilities mentioned above and consistent human efforts on the strategic side of experience optimization can significantly help an organization add to customer happiness and satisfaction level. 

Conclusion

In a time when customers demand real-time services and customised experiences, businesses cannot depend on human pace for all their marketing activities. They need to find new and better ways to convert hard work into smart work. Use technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning that have the ability to help you become omnipresent, run 24×7, and deliver the exact shopping experiences that customers demand in today’s day and age. 

We hope the webinar enriches your understanding of the role of machine learning in experience optimization. 

If this topic interests you, we’d encourage you to watch the entire session, and don’t forget to register for VWO’s upcoming webinars to learn from more such experts in the industry. 

What are CRO tools?

Conversion rate optimization tools are software apps or platforms that marketers, developers, and UI/UX designers use to dig into user behavior, spot any roadblocks, and experiment with the user experience in the hopes of boosting their conversion rates. 

CRO tools come with a range of useful features, either as standalone options or bundled together. The features usually allow heat mapping, session recording, form analytics, A/B testing, personalization, and feedback tools that allow to create of opt-in forms and deploy surveys.

CRO tools help to overcome leaky bucket syndrome and improve the returns on business efforts.

When do you need CRO tools?

A website is a home to many actions. Button clicks, form fills, purchases, and many more events collectively constitute engagement and conversions. Experience managers tend to look at these actions from both macro (site-wide) and micro (visitor-level) lenses to understand their visitors and map their business’s overall conversion rate. A CRO tool helps them in analyzing and optimizing the conversion rate. 

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

But there’s a problem.

Even though experienced managers make sure to take every bit of information into account to analyze customer behavior and optimize their business performance, many often don’t use the right conversion rate optimization tools, leaving room for flaws and glitches to breed. To avoid such hiccups, we highly recommend following CRO tools based on each conversion rate optimization stage to effectively enhance your website and business’s performance.

Before you add any CRO tools to your arsenal, evaluate whether you can build them yourself or buy them after going through the following carefully. 

How to choose the right CRO tools?

GDPR Compliance

Since you’re engaging with visitor data at each stage, it’s essential to ensure that your data collection tools must be GDPR compliant.

Integrations

To avoid data silos when using multiple data analytics tools, ensure that the tool has ‘integrations’ with other tools you use or open APIs to build custom integrations. This helps prevent data duplication, confusion, and related uncertainties.

Security

If you plan to install supporting CRO software on your website, ensure the tool doesn’t get breached, especially when running experiments. Your CRO tools must be safe and secure to use. Single sign-ons, multi-step logins, etc. help ensure security. Check your CRO tool under consideration for these critical features. 

A multi-user-friendly dashboard

When selecting a CRO tool, make sure it offers an integrated dashboard where mapping your experiments and other activities is easy. A user-friendly dashboard also allows cross-team collaboration, which is a building block in CRO. 

After evaluating the tools, let’s now look at some must-have CRO tools based on different conversion rate optimization stages. 

Top CRO tools for different testing stages

The research stage

When it comes to conducting research, multiple CRO tools exist that help map both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data tools, such as web analytics, offer insights into what’s happening on your site. Qualitative tools such as heatmaps, scroll maps, surveys, and the like give context to why it’s happening.

Mentioned below are some of the best CRO analyzer and research tools you can use to collect necessary visitor data to form data-backed hypotheses for your CRO test campaigns.   

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best web analytics tools that track website traffic and user activities, such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, and more in real-time, across various site pages. It also offers additional information such as traffic source(s), visitor location and demographics, page performance, and conversions. It is one of the free CRO tools that has a premium version, Google Analytics 360, to unlock more in-depth insights. 

Cost/month – Free

VWO Insights

VWO Insights is a popular and must-have user behavior research product for CRO professionals. It helps understand customer behavior through heat mapping tools, session recordings, on-page surveys, funnel analytics, and more. The qualitative user behavioral data you get from VWO Insights helps form thorough hypotheses for your CRO roadmap.

Cost/month: Free plan – for 5000 monthly tracked users, while the cost for three paid plans (Growth, Pro, and Enterprise) varies with the number of monthly plan users. Visit plans and pricing to know more.

Heap Analytics

Heap Analytics is one of the conversion optimization tools that captures visitor interactions, including clicks, form submits, and transactions, and helps identify behaviors, and marketing channels that convert the most. Heap also has a clean data analytics dashboard that’s handy and easy to use. When using the tool, you don’t have to create additional ‘events’ to track basic website interactions, as in Google Analytics.

Cost/month: Four comprehensive plans, including Free, Growth, Pro, and Premium. Only custom pricing is available.

Mixpanel

If a popular web analytics tool like Google Analytics sheds light on what’s exactly happening on your website, Mixpanel helps you see who did what. With visitor behavior tracking, you also get the advantage of viewing specific insights into which set of website visitors have entered your sales funnel, which ones are bouncing off, and so on.

Mixpanel also offers an additional second data channel to compare numbers against Google, as it’s never a good idea to trust one tool for all analytical data blindly. 

Cost/month: Free plan, Growth – $20+/month, Enterprise – $833+/month

UsabilityHub

One of the biggest advantages of having UsabilityHub in your conversion tool kit is that it eliminates the guesswork out of design decisions by validating them with real users. In other words, it’s an opinion-gathering tool that enables you to sample responses from real users and make necessary design decisions.  

UsabilityHub comes packed with capabilities, including design survey tools, first-click tests, five-second tests, and preference tests to uncover useful user insights.

Cost/month: It offers a free plan, an $89/month basic plan, a $199/month pro plan, and Custom pricing for enterprise services

Intercom

Besides the above-mentioned user behavior research tools, having Intercom in your CRO arsenal is also a must. The tool helps fetch immense valuable data. Intercom enables experienced managers and optimizers to analyze chat logs, call recordings, and customer support threads to discover any patterns. Recurring questions can serve as useful insights to uncover problematic areas on the website and subsequently fix them to offer a better user experience. Such insights also prove beneficial while drafting testing ideas for your CRO program.

Cost/month: Three plans– Starter ($74/month) and custom plans and pricing for Pro and Premium plan. 

Userpeek

Although Userpeek is not an A/B testing tool, the CRO software surely helps understand how users interact with your website. It enables you to test your site for ideas, hypotheses, and prototypes, and map the performance of existing site assets with real users in the shortest possible time with minimal effort and budget. The tool can give you a clear insight into which direction to follow when it comes to A/B testing.

Cost/month: Flex Plan – $55/test (pay per test); Pro Plan – $211/month. Custom pricing for Team Plan.

The Hypothesis stage

Once you’ve gathered and analyzed all the necessary website visitor data using the above-mentioned research tools, it’s time to move to the next stage – create a hypothesis – for your (next) experiment(s). 

A data-backed hypothesis is key to properly running a CRO experiment. Here are some must-have tools to use when crafting a hypothesis.

Craig Sullivan’s hypothesis framework

Craig Sullivan is a CRO influencer who shares a handy kit with two options to write a good, data-backed hypothesis. Here take a look: 

While each has its own meaning and relevance, we’d recommend using the Advanced Kit when running high-impact experiments.  

Test hypothesis creator

This 7-step test hypothesis creator draws inspiration from Sullivan’s ‘legacy’ hypothesis format. The tool allows you to easily create a hypothesis by filling in the empty form fields. However, we’d recommend you use one more hypothesis creator to validate your hypothesis. 

Cost: Free

VWO Plan

VWO Plan enables you to manage and prioritize all your experimentation programs in one single place. It provides an expert-recommended framework that helps you build comprehensive hypotheses. You can also grant scores to each of these hypotheses, based on impact, confidence, and ease, to create a prioritization pipeline. 

VWO Plan gives you the advantage of automating your workflow as well. You can quickly move hypotheses from testing to completion and archive stage as they move across various testing stages. 

Cost: Free

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

The prioritization stage

Once you’ve created your hypothesis, it’s time to design, develop, and test the variations you’re planning to run against the original versions. You can either hire a dedicated resource or a team to build A/B testing experiments or use the support provided by VWO. 

Here are some must-have tools for this stage.

TestLodge

TestLodge is another test management tool that helps manage various project requirements, test plans, test cases, test runs, user testing, and related reporting. With a simple and easy-to-learn interface and no user limits, the tool allows you and your entire team to manage respective A/B testing plans, requirements, and test cases, all in one single place. Another feature that makes TestLodge stand out is that it’s a web-based, cloud-hosted tool enabling you to access the tool anytime and anywhere you want. 

Cost/month: Team – $99/month, Business – $299/month, and Enterprise – $499/month

VWO Plan

Besides enabling you to build hypotheses, with the VWO Plan, you can prioritize multiple experimentation ideas. Each hypothesis can be scored on its winning likelihood, expected impact on macro goals, technical feasibility, and time investment. Additionally, you can manage hypotheses through their entire lifecycle with VWO’s integrated custom workflows. 

At a glance, you can track a backlog of test opportunities, what’s next in the A/B testing pipeline, and which ones have completed their course. 

Cost: Free

TestRail

TestRail is one of the leading test case and test management software tools. It enables you to easily manage and track your testing ideas and hypotheses. Its web-based user interface enables you to easily create test cases, manage different test suites, and even coordinate throughout the entire testing process with various stakeholders. The tool also provides real-time insights into your testing progress and even boosts productivity by personalizing your to-do lists, filters, and email notifications. 

Cost/month: The pricing depends on the number of users and cloud and server management.

The testing stage

Now that the treatment is ready, it’s time to run your planned CRO experiments. But before you jump in, ensure to get your sample size and test duration right as they’re two crucial factors to running a meaningful CRO experiment. Here are some handy tools to help you at this stage.

Pre-testing stage tools

A/B test duration calculator

This handy A/B test duration calculator enables you to easily and quickly calculate how long a test should run to get a statistically significant result. It provides comprehensive insights about the test, optimizations, UI/UX, and more. Additionally, the A/B testing calculator uses the Bayesian test approach to eliminate the chances of implementing non-significant test variations, which may show negative results.  

Cost/month: Free

A/B test significance calculator

An A/B test significance calculator is a simple calculator that shows if an A/B (or multivariate) test exhibits a statistically significant result. 

Cost/month: Free

Sample size calculator

A sample size calculator helps calculate a sample size of customers that you must consider when running an A/B test to ensure statistical significance.

Cost/month: Free

The split test duration calculator

If you’re planning to run a split test, then this is your go-to tool. A Split test duration calculator, as designed and offered by Michael Kjeldsen, shows how long your split test must run based on your current conversion rate and planned uplift, number of variations being tested, average daily traffic, and statistical confidence level.

Cost/month: Free

Testing stage tools

VWO Testing

VWO is one of the most comprehensive and popular testing tools for all types and sizes of businesses. With VWO Testing, you can easily do A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing using its code and visual editor. From A/B testing small changes such as changing the CTA button position on a product page to experimenting with multiple page elements, the possibilities of experimentation are endless. The design dashboard is also quite simple and easy to understand.

Cost/month: Free plan: for 5000 monthly tracked users, while the cost for three paid plans (Growth, Pro, and Enterprise) varies with the number of monthly plan users.

The Five-Second Test

The Five-Second Test tool has been designed on the lines that five seconds are enough for customers or visitors to interact with a website’s design and grab the primary message. These five seconds can shed light on useful user insights such as their actions, first impressions about the brand, and more. Hence, the Five Second Test can be a valuable addition to your CRO tool kit. 

Cost/month: It offers a free plan, an $89/month basic plan, a $199/month pro plan, and Custom pricing for enterprise services.

The learning stage

This is the stage where you conclude your tests, close the conversion rate optimization loop, and make a note of all the learnings. With a CRO solution like VWO, you get access to an in-built reporting system to analyze the performance of your tests and customer journeys and pen down learnings for the next set of experiments, irrespective of whether your test wins or doesn’t.

Wrapping it up!

While this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the CRO tools that you must have or use, but a glimpse of the most recommended tools across the entire conversion rate optimization domain. You can select a handful of these tools as per your optimization requirements and get started. If you’re someone who prefers using only one single, integrated tool for all their optimization needs, then VWO is your go-to tool. 

VWO gives you the advantage of collecting data using its sophisticated data-gathering capabilities and creating and penning down all hypotheses in one single place. You can also test priorities, quickly set and run A/B tests, and even map results through the entire optimization process using various other VWO capabilities. 

Here’s a quick glimpse into VWO’s capabilities.

If you have any questions related to VWO or wish to learn more about its capabilities, sign up for a free trial or request a demo today!

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Enter split testing.

Unlike other marketing techniques, split testing, otherwise called A/B testing, helps experience optimizers focus their energies and dollars in the right direction. It typically enables them to experiment with other marketing campaigns or strategies in real-time. 

If you are an experience optimizer, you can seek your target audience’s opinion by showing them old and new versions of a website page or element you wish to change through split testing. You can also compare the experiment results to see which version shows better improvement and use the gathered data to make informed decisions on whether or not to go ahead and make the changes. 

Split testing is, therefore, the method of conducting controlled, randomized experiments with the core objective of improving a website metric. These could be overall business conversions, click-through rates, number of purchases, form completions, and more. 

Let’s get in-depth to fully understand the concept of split testing, its scope, how you can start implementing it, and tools that aid you in the process. 

Simplifying the concept of split testing

The objective of split testing is to identify how a change to a web page, advertising campaign, or email will increase or decrease the chances of an outcome. For instance, let’s say you’re the owner of an online homemade chocolate venture. Your monthly website traffic is 50,000 visitors. As a marketing-savvy owner, the hypothesis you want to test is that customers are more likely to make a purchase when enticed with additional discounts or deals on all products, despite your brand being a renowned name in the market. To get certainty, you plan to run a split test. 

You create a new version of your homepage banner, mentioning additional discounts that all visitors can avail on all products. The original homepage banner simply illustrates new products introduced in the current month with regular launch offers. 

You float the test and make each version visible to equal traffic. 50% of the visitors see the old version (control), and 50% see the new version (variation). Running the test for a couple of weeks, you witness that your hypothesis was correct. People who saw the variation version of your test bought more chocolates from your website than those who saw your test’s control version.

The outcome? Split testing provides definitive conclusions about specific elements of your web page. It offers the swiftest way to find whether or not your planned business strategies or campaigns will showcase a positive result and help move the needle upward. Additionally, split testing also helps save time, money, and effort and gives results in a shorter timespan. You can see this for yourself by taking a 30-day all-inclusive free trial with VWO. 

Which pages or page elements should you split test?

If you’re planning to run a split test on your site, there are a couple of logical places to start. Ideally, you should begin testing pages that add the highest value to your business.

Once you’ve identified these pages, deep dive into the page elements that you’d like to experiment with, which can impact your key metric. Typical page elements include, but are not limited to:

• Headline
• Feature/Banner image
• CTA
• Purchase button
• Form
• Testimonials
• Entire page design 

The example below from Ben, a Netherlands-based personal budget challenger of the Dutch telecom industry, nicely illustrates how a small change in a page’s element can significantly increase the conversion rate. The company ran a split test on its product pages to make the phone color prominently visible to the page visitors. The execs at the organization found that most people visiting the product pages were unaware that they could choose phone colors along with selecting the best data and voice plans for themselves. The data collected through VWO Insights also revealed that people did not notice the color palette given below the mobile image or couldn’t understand the palette’s basic function. 

To make the section visible and selection easy, the execs at Ben shifted the color palette from below the mobile image and placed it adjacent to the product image. 

Here’s how the control and the variation look: 

After running this test for about two weeks, the execs found that by merely making a slight change on their product page, they were able to increase their conversions by 17.63% and significantly reduce customer calls to change device colors as well.

Numerous other page elements can be tested that may increase the conversion rate.

What’s great about split testing is that it’s a universally applicable experimentation method. The experience optimizers can use this capability to examine any assumption or theory they or their colleagues come across, without any hesitation. Be it an eCommerce site, a social media campaign, an ad campaign, and so on, everything can be tested using the split testing methodology. 

Statistical modeling: Bayesian vs. Frequentist approach

Before moving ahead to learn about how to run a split test, it’s essential to understand the statistical modeling on which all experiments run. 

All split testing tools either work on the Frequentist or the Bayesian statistical model. In the case of the Frequentist model, the conclusion of an event is drawn based on how many times the outcome has occurred through the course of the experiment. A test using the Frequentist approach requires a larger sample size to ensure it shows a statistically significant conclusion. In short, you have to collect data in abundance. For a page or website with low traffic, this approach would require a lengthy testing phase.

On the other hand, the Bayesian statistical model is based on the likelihood of an outcome occurring. You don’t need the same number of visitors to predict likelihood. It’s a fundamental difference. Tests conducted on the Bayesian model can be run for a shorter time (as low as 50%) than the Frequentist model and get actionable findings for low traffic pages faster. Hence, the Bayesian model makes more sense and proves more useful for all types and sizes of campaign and strategy experimentations. We, at VWO, also use and advocate the Bayesian model over Frequentist. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Getting started with split testing

When planning to run a split test, it’s always better to have a structured and well-crafted plan to make efforts more profitable. Here’s how to create an effective split testing campaign. 

Research

Before building a split-testing plan, it’s better to conduct thorough research to understand the current performance of the page or element you’re planning to test. Collect all the relevant data using qualitative and quantitative data gathering tools around the test elements.

Observe and formulate hypotheses

Make keen observations around the gathered data and draw user insights to draft a data-backed hypothesis. Use the below-given hypothesis creation formula to write a good, thorough hypothesis. You must also test your hypothesis against various parameters, such as impact, confidence, and ease. Impact means the likeliness of your test to affect your key metrics positively. Confidence is your belief in the hypothesis proving true. Ease refers to how difficult or easy it will be to implement the changes and run the test.

Create variations

After drafting a data-backed hypothesis, create variations. With VWO’s powerful Visual Editor it is quick and easy to create variations that you wish to test against the original version. A variation is another version of your original or current version with changes that you want to test. 

Run the test

Once you’ve locked variations that you want to test, set up the test. Kick off the test and wait for the stipulated time for the test to reach statistical significance. Please note that no matter what kind of test you run, let it complete its due course. If you stop the test in between, the chances of getting the wrong results will surely increase. 

Result analysis and deployment

This is the step to analyze the results of the test. See if your variations have shown an uplift in the key metrics. In case your variation wins, implement the changes. Meanwhile, if your test loses, use the data to learn and make amendments to your future experiments.

How to choose a good split testing tool

When choosing a good testing tool, there are a couple of features and functions that you must consider. Look for an all-inclusive tool that’s intuitive and easy-to-use to develop new test versions and run tests as well. Make sure the tool you select enables you to:

1. Gather and analyze qualitative and quantitative data and get in-depth information about how various business metrics are performing
2. Run multiple tests in parallel but on isolated audiences to ensure none influences the results of one another
3. Set up tests with minimum developer help
4. Easily create hypotheses and test versions using its in-built features 
5. Use multiple widgets for testing and adding popups, banners, or other prompts to generate leads
6. Speedily access accurate results to understand whether or not your hypothesis will show positive results
7. Quickly deploy tests and map results throughout the testing process

VWO fits this bill perfectly. You can explore its capabilities by taking a 30-day free trial. You can also go through this list of recommended split testing tools. 

Conclusion

No website owner or experience optimizer should ever rest on their laurels. They must always look for improvements and optimization techniques to ensure their websites and related campaigns perform better and consistently increase business revenue. Split testing is a vital means of making changes based on data rather than assumptions. Leverage it now and in the future.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Experience optimizers across the globe suggest that the best way eCommerce businesses can survive today’s market heat, maintain their customer base, and ensure revenue growth is by investing much into modern marketing activities and focusing their energies on testing and optimization. These have the prowess to provide seamless and frictionless customer experiences and help businesses succeed.

Assuming you’re already familiar with modern marketing activities and their importance in today’s time, we’d like to jump directly to the benefits of eCommerce testing and optimization, key challenges, and website areas and elements that you must test.

What is eCommerce testing? Why is it important?

eCommerce testing can be defined as the process of testing various eCommerce website elements such as design, specifications, functionalities, pages, and features to check their sanity and ensure they’re not harming the performance of the site in any manner possible.

When done correctly and continuously, testing can not only improve your site visitors’ overall experience but significantly increase conversions as well. Mentioned below are some reasons explaining the importance of testing and optimization.

1. Improve user engagement

As stated above, testing helps check the hygiene of a page element. It tells us which page element or process affects a user’s onsite journey and helps us rectify the issues faster. The better the user experience, the more shall be the onsite engagement.     

2. Generate marketing strategies

Testing and optimization allow you to make effective plans for your website. By reiterating your site’s problematic areas, you can engage more people and also increase their stay. 

3. Reduce risks

Many times, making major and considerable changes to your site can cause notable strategic changes or even trigger significant losses. However, testing these changes in a planned manner can help eliminate the chances of these uncertain losses.  

4. Increase conversion rates

Since you’re testing almost every aspect of your website and ensuring a smooth visitor experience through site optimization, your conversion rate is bound to increase. 

5. Better understanding of visitor behavior

It’s often difficult to map your website visitors’ needs and preferences and optimize your site accordingly. But with testing, everything is possible. It’s one of the best and quickest ways to confirm what your visitors like.  

What should you know before you run an eCommerce test?

From the source code to product pages, you can test the viability of every element of your website using an extensive range of testing methods. Some of the most common methods are as follows:

• Functional testing
• Usability testing
• Security testing
• Performance testing 
• Database testing
• Mobile application testing

While each of these methods has its own rules and regulations, running multiple tests using multiple testing methods at the same time can cause chaos as well as disrupt test results. Hence, it’s always advised to run one test at a time or use a good testing tool like VWO that enables you to run multiple tests simultaneously without one overlapping the other. 

Given this fact, you must prioritize the order in which you want to run tests based on the test’s impact on your brand’s overall conversion rate. Theories like agile testing, which is used by teams conducting software testing, can help you find the balance.

Logically, focus on significant bugs and software flaws that impact everyone through mobile app testing and website testing first. Once you’ve addressed these issues, then look at the minor bugs.

Furthermore, it’s always a good idea to evaluate your test ideas and testing techniques on a regular basis because a poor website testing strategy can lead to loss of customers, revenue, and even jeopardize your brand’s reputation in the market. You must always carefully outline the testing scope, set the objectives, check it’s viability or chances of success, and estimate efforts in a time frame.

What are some key issues related to eCommerce testing?

The underlying principle behind a good user experience (UX) is to make life easy for your visitors. Every task on your website should be intuitive. You want people to be able to navigate around your website or application with minimum fuss.

While these principles are straightforward, it’s their implementation where things get tricky. A lot of factors play into the user experience. Think of all the stages of a user’s journey and test them from the first click on a product to the shopping cart. 

For example, through form analysis, you can track how people are interacting with various input fields. This information provides you with insights on where users are experiencing problems. You can use this data to develop a hypothesis and run a test to check whether your assumptions or assertions are correct.

1. Testing for bugs

Regardless of how well you develop your website, there shall always remain some bugs in your wireframe that may disrupt your site’s functionality or hinder the visitor’s journey. While developers once couldn’t do anything about these bugs, today, they can use testing to fix these issues and create seamless UI/UX designs. 

Some of the most common bugs that you may find on your eCommerce website are as follows:

• Browser compatibility problems
• Broken links
• Inconsistencies in the catalog
• Shopping cart issues
• Checkout bugs

According to a study by QualiTest, most of the bugs that sites encounter are of medium severity. These do not impair the usability of the site. However, they do have the potential to impact the eCommerce conversion rate and overall business sales.

When managing an eCommerce store, it’s essential to put a system to identify bugs and eliminate them as soon as possible. It is especially important to have a quality assurance strategy in place when undertaking any sustained eCommerce testing.

2. Testing conversion rates

Your eCommerce conversion rate ultimately defines the success of your business. The higher the conversion rate, the higher shall be your business’ revenue. Understandably, given the importance of sales to any business, conversion rates focus on extensive eCommerce testing.

There are various stages to any conversion rate optimization test. The first stage is to set objectives and determine the most suitable type of test. Your choice must always be based on data, rather than pure intuitions. For example, if you decide to review your brand’s purchase cycle, ensure to data back all your decisions.

The next step is to test and gather available data and form a hypothesis. Tools like heatmaps, form analytics, scrollmaps, session recordings etc. can help analyze user behavior and provide useful information. Always gather enough information before running a test to ensure you’re moving in the right direction. 

Standard statistical testing methods include A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing. You can use this A/B duration calculator to determine how long a test on your site will take.

Which site areas and elements should you test?

The ultimate goal of every test is to increase the conversions and revenue of your eCommerce business. You want to focus on running conversion optimization tests that provide the maximum return on investment. There are certain areas of your eCommerce website that you will naturally target to ensure a seamless visitor experience. Some of these are as follows:

1. Search and navigation

Site search and navigation are two of your website’s primary elements extensively used by your visitors to explore your website or mobile app. Ensuring they’re free of bugs and promise a frictionless experience must always be your top priority. 

Best Choice Products, an eCommerce website selling garden, music, children, and fitness products, illustrates the importance of testing your navigation. As part of a round of eCommerce A/B testing, they ran a test on their mobile navigation and search bar. They hypothesised that by improving the visibility of the search bar on the header will improve user penetration into the website. The control and variation version of the test are as follows

Running the test for about 7 days, the execs at Best Choice Products witnessed that visitors were engaging more with the search functionality. A minor change on the header resulted in a 0.1% increase in site revenue. It may not have been a game changer, but it did help the company get more revenue than before.

2. Homepage design and features

The homepage is one of the most important pages of any website, for it represents the face of your brand. Even if it’s not your primary landing page, it still deserves to be one of the most intricately designed pages. You need to offer great user experience and ensure that everything works as it should.

There are numerous forms of eCommerce testing you can run on your homepage. One thing which is becoming increasingly accessible to sites across content management systems is website personalization. The Very Group’s website is a perfect example to quote here.

Based on a visitor’s geographic and demographic information, the site shows personalized homepages to each of its visitors. For instance, and as visible in the image below, if a customer lands on Very’s homepage during the winters, it displays a collection accordingly. Meanwhile, if the customer belongs to a country experiencing summers, the website personalizes user experience accordingly.

Personalized homepage and landing pages open new and exciting avenues for eCommerce testing.

3. Product pages

A visitor to your eCommerce store will either land directly on a product page or eventually navigate to one. Once there, you want them to purchase the product. Ask yourself, what does your potential client need to know about this product or service to get them to my payment gateway? What can I do to increase the likelihood of a person adding a product to the shopping basket?

Unfortunately, there is no one answer to these questions.

You will need to run tests to see what changes you make to the product details page that get your business the best results. For example, you can test if adding elements that emphasize on scarcity or urgency would boost sales.

Other elements on a product page you can test include your CTA, social proof, images, videos, recommended products, featured products, etc. Changes to any of these elements have the potential to increase conversion rates to the shopping cart and onto your payment gateway.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

4. Shopping cart and checkout process

It is a well-known fact that cart abandonment rates are high. According to BigCommerce, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.23%. This is the number of people who put a product into their cart and leave without making a purchase.

There is a large body of information on why people abandon a shopping cart during an online purchase. The graph below illustrates some common findings.

Improving your checkout and payment system revolves around addressing some or all of these issues. The eCommerce website Zalora offers an insight into how eCommerce testing on checkout pages can improve conversion rates.

They ran an A/B test on their checkout page, testing how they could emphasize the free returns policy for some products. The control is on the left, and the variant is on the right.

The variant outperformed the control by 12%. This small change to the design of the checkout page caused an uplift in the checkout rate.

There are, of course, other elements to test. Adding more credit card payment options, security logos, social proof, and more can all lift your conversion rate. The important thing is to instill a culture of testing into your company, and experiment to discover what works.

Optimizing your shopping cart experience for conversions is one of the quickest ways to increase sales. Running these tests is a lot easier than you might imagine. Try VWO now to see for yourself.

5. Site performance across devices

As mentioned earlier, people are accessing your website through an increasing range of devices. A study by Statcounter shows that 52.03% of the world population accesses the internet through mobile.^[5] At a basic level, it’s essential to have responsive websites. This allows you to adapt your site to different devices and screen sizes.

However, even if your site is responsive, you can still encounter problems. Cross-browser compatibility issues are common. To further complicate matters, the OS a website is accessed on, the screen’s size, and the internet speed all impact user experience.

As you are no doubt aware, there is a clear correlation between the amount of time a page on your site takes to load and the likelihood of someone making a purchase. The graph below illustrates this point.

There is a high probability that your website’s page load time is optimized for desktop because for most sites it is. However, mobile load time can vary tremendously. You must implement technical solutions that address problems like this alongside optimizing your eCommerce website copy and design elements. Every step a user takes through your website is part of their user experience. 

Summing up – eCommerce testing

A culture of testing will play an important role in the success of your company. Ensuring a smooth user experience is essential to customer retention. Meanwhile, updates to a site design through conversion rate optimization can have a significant impact on profits.

In this guide, we looked at the importance of eCommerce testing. We covered the types of tests you can run on your site and discussed some of the practicalities of running these tests. Finally, we discussed some of your eCommerce store’s most important elements to test, backing up each point with data and case studies that illustrate why it matters to your business.

Note: The author owns screenshots used in the blog.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

Before diving deep into how to measure your brand’s conversion rate, what are the benchmarks, and how to increase conversions, let’s start with the basics and understand what is a conversion and a conversion rate. 

What is a conversion and conversion rate?

Digital marketers are typically dawned with two major tasks. One, building brand awareness in the online marketplace, and growing website traffic using techniques like search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and social media marketing. The second being, nurturing these website visitors with optimization and personalization to convert them into paying customers. This phenomenon of turning a potential visitor into a brand customer counts as a conversion. 

The conversion rate, on the other hand, is the percentage of people who take the desired action on your website. This can be anything, from making a purchase to subscribing to your services, downloading an eBook, and more. 

Tracking conversion rates helps assess many aspects of your business. You get an idea of your messaging’s potency, the persuasiveness of any product pages, the effectiveness of your CTA buttons, and more. A higher conversion rate also means your marketing strategies are proving effective and helping your brand stand out. 

How to find your brand’s current website conversion rate?

Calculating your brand’s conversion rate is quite simple and straightforward. All you need to do is divide the total number of conversions recorded during a specific time frame by your site or landing page’s total traffic and multiply it by 100. 

Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%

For example, if your site was visited by 10,000 in July and recorded 2,000 conversions, your conversion rate will be 20%. Besides manually calculating the percentage, you can also view/track your conversion rate through an analytics platform (Google Analytics) or online advertising platform (Google Ads and Facebook Ads). 

Another great thing about the conversion rate is that you can be as broad or as specific as possible. Meaning, in addition to mapping the conversion rate of your website, you can also measure the conversion rate of various marketing channels, different pages, campaigns, individual ads, keywords, and so on.

It’s an excellent metric to evaluate the performance of almost every aspect of your website and online marketing efforts. Getting clicks on your CTAs is great, but ensuring these clicks end up benefiting your brand is what matters the most.  

Where does your brand stand? What is a good website conversion rate?

If you’ve been following so far, we’re anticipating you must have calculated your website’s conversion rate out of eagerness. But what does that figure speak about your brand and its performance in the online marketplace? For that, it’s essential to know your industry’s average conversion rate. 

As per MarketingSherpa’s analysis (represented in the graph displayed above), the conversion rate of the B2B industry ranges between 2% and 10%, with the average mark hovering around 2.55%. eCommerce, on the other hand, registers an average conversion rate of about 2.63%.

If your calculated conversion rate percentage stands anything near or instead, is more than these averages, your brand is certainly performing well. Meanwhile, if your percentage is way lesser than the average benchmark, it’s time to revamp your optimization and marketing strategies, and A/B test your changes.  

Simple tips to boost your brand’s conversion rate

Boosting conversions is the central premise of conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO is a nuanced and complicated process. But when done right, it can significantly improve your brand image and pave the way for higher revenue gains. Mentioned below are three simple tips to help you boost your website’s conversion rate.

1. Audit and improve

When you find content with a low conversion rate, there’s a danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Inexperienced marketers get tempted to scrap the page entirely and start over again. That’s not the best way to do things. Instead, perform proper audits and discover why your site’s content isn’t working in your favor.

Auditing various metrics such as bounce rate, visitor time spent, total and unique visitors, etc. is one of the activities you should perform. Using this quantitative data along with qualitative data (gathered through heatmaps, scrollmaps, session recordings, funnels, etc.) to create hypotheses and conducting A/B tests is the other thing you must do to identify potential loopholes or leaks.

A/B testing is arguably one of the best ways to find faulty page elements and fix them to uplift conversions. 

Let’s take Locations Hawaii, for example. It’s a website that helps find a property that best suits their needs and demands using innovative technology solutions. For Locations Hawaii, property inquiries generated through their real estate search website were what drove the business. However, their conversions were below average, giving a hard time to the company in terms of overall revenue generation. After a thorough analysis of their lead-gen page and stepping into a user’s shoes, the Location Hawaii execs decided to A/B test whether they could generate inquiries through their property details page. 

They created two variations based on two ideas:

1. Change the CTA from “Inquire” to “Contact Agent” displayed in a bigger font size.
2. Moving the new CTA (“Contact Agent”) above “Inquire.”

Running the test with three variations, the company noticed that Variation 2 increased their overall conversion rate by 22.97% over the control.

2. Make offers clear & unique

At a basic level, your lead magnet is what you’re offering in exchange for conversion. For example, allowing visitors to download an eBook in exchange for an email address, providing a 10% on new signups, or posting an original story that convinces visitors to rally to buy your product. The action you want is for visitors to provide valuable information such as their email address, phone number, etc. that help you build a vast base of potential leads. 

However, for a lead magnet to work in your favor, it ought to ooze clarity, uniqueness, and conveys an offer that’s hard to resist. Using appropriate CTAs and optimizing related page elements is equally important. 

For example, The Vineyard, a hotel located in Berkshire, United Kingdom, decided to run an A/B test on the text CTA, “Book Online,” embedded on their room booking page. They noted that the CTA was almost invisible to the naked eyes, especially owing to its positioning and being a running text call to action. The Vineyard decided to make the CTA more prominently visible to their visitors and hoped to see an increase in the over click-through rate. They created a CTA button with the same text “Book Online” and placed it just below the banner image on the right side.

The Vineyard saw a 32.12% increase in their click-through rate (CTR) beating the control by a near perfect score of 99.99%.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

3. Remove unintentional barriers

User experience is another factor that’s critical to CRO. The better the user experience, the higher will be the conversion rate. Create a website that has a clean design, clearly displays your brand’s offerings, is easy to navigate, and has a good load speed. Cluttering it with unnecessary data and page elements will only disrupt a customer’s experience and hamper your conversion rate.  

Take a product page, for example. Rather than loading it with any and every information about the product in the form of long paragraphs, convert it into easily digestible bullet points. Leave some white space for the website to breathe. Place your CTA right in front of the visitors’ eyes or in a place where visitors are most likely not to miss noticing it. Remove unintentional barriers and let customers enjoy their visit to your virtual store or office. 

To explain the concept in-depth, let’s take Flying Scot as an example. A 24-hour airport security parking provider in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Flying Scot, noticed it’s conversion rate was the same for a long time. By diving deep into data and doing a thorough analysis of the behavior of its visitor, Flying Scot noted that most visitors were bouncing off from its booking page without completing and submitting the booking form. The execs at the organization hypothesized that they might witness an increase if they simplified their booking form. They ran an A/B test to verify their hypothesis. Below are the control and variation variants of the test.  

To their surprise, the company saw a 35% increase in form submission and a 45.45% increase in their overall conversion rate. 

Just by decluttering an important website page, you can pave the way for higher conversions.

Time to start improving the conversion rate for your brand

Understanding the importance of optimization to increase conversions is very important. The better optimized your site is, the more conversions it will attract. If you’re someone who was still not paying much attention to the very concept of conversion rate optimization, now is the time to rethink.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

From digital marketing to conversion marketing

Unlike the efforts of the early 2000s, today’s digital marketing operations are more about creating smart, customer-oriented processes and structures, and developing capabilities that make your brand stand out. 

SEO, PPC advertising, and other similar marketing techniques are critical aspects of any digital marketing program. When coupled with newer CRO marketing approaches such as optimization, personalization, and technologies like AI and ML, digital marketing can transform into a growth engine for your business.

Take Netflix, for example. Founded in 1997, Netflix today has over 200 million paid users spanning 190 counties. While much has to do with the online streaming giant’s constant innovation in its services and using new technologies and algorithms to power its platform, its digital marketing efforts cannot be ignored. Over the past decade, Netflix has spent $1,046.46 million on average on marketing and has $16.6 billion annual revenue. 

Diving into Netflix’s marketing strategies, we understand that the online streaming giant has invested much into search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, augmented and virtual reality content, video marketing, platform optimization, and personalization, using machine learning to enhance user experience. But how well has all that marketing activity translated into customers? Well, it’s no surprise that Netflix has an astounding 93% conversion rate on free trials. This is incredible, even compared to Amazon Prime Video, which still sits at an impressive 73%.

Smart ways to improve your conversion rate

There aren’t any silver bullets to increase the conversion rate of your business. It’s a process that requires persistence and precision. But, when done well, it does promise incremental growth and revenue gains. Learning from the experience and expertise of market leaders such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, and more, we’ve detailed smart and tactical ways to improve your brand’s conversion rate. 

1. Optimize landing pages

Landing pages play a critical role in defining your business’ conversion rate. They aren’t just ordinary pages of your website, rather your brand’s face. They’re where your visitors land and craft their very first impression of your brand. 

Before moving ahead with any other marketing efforts, optimizing your landing pages is paramount. Ensure every element of these pages speaks of convenience and paves the way to a seamless customer experience. 

Take, for example, your site’s click-through landing page. The very purpose of the page is to provide your visitors with all the necessary information about your brand offerings, be it a topic, product, service, or an offer that convinces them to enter your conversion funnel. The more precise information you furnish on these pages to guide them to specific, targeted pages, the higher the click-through rate will be.

In the case of a lead capturing landing page, ensure your page/form’s headline is clear and concise, asks for minimal yet essential customer information, and has a CTA prominently visible to the naked eye. 

2. Test exhaustively to get high conversions

Optimizing your conversion rate marketing efforts requires exhaustive testing because you can’t maximize conversions straight out of the gate. To get closer to perfection and get more customers onboard, A/B testing your marketing strategies is critical.

A/B testing should be a continuous process. Mentioned below are some important aspects of your site pages that significantly impact your conversion rate. 

• Headlines
• Images, videos, and visuals
• Copy
• Banners & links
• Navigation options
• CTAs

Numerous case studies show how optimizing page elements have helped thousands of businesses increase their conversions. For example, AMD is one of VWO’s customers that heavily uses A/B testing to improve its brand image. From one of its recent experiments that aimed to increase social shares, AMD tested six social icon placement versions, which resulted in a 3600% increase in social sharing with no adverse impact on the site’s overall engagement rate.

Amazon and Netflix stand amidst companies that rely heavily on A/B testing to improve their conversion rates. 

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

3. Optimize your CTAs for better engagement

Perhaps one of the more essential elements to test and tailor are your call to action (CTA) buttons. Converting visitors is about persuading them to take a specific action. Your CTAs precisely guide them on how to do so.

You need clear and appealing CTAs, be it on your social media pages, landing pages, or any other page, that effectively convey your message. No visitor should be confused regarding what action to take next. In many cases, CTA buttons are more effective than simple text links. They’re usually bold, attractive, and are designed to grab your visitors’ attention instantly. In the example below, Manna Natural Cosmetics saw an increase of 490% in its click-through rate by simply highlighting its product name and prominently highlighting the checkout CTA.

Avoid using generic or boring texts like ‘Click here,” Find out more,” Read more,’ etc. Instead, draft quirky CTAs such as ‘Get your free guide’ or ‘Learn how we can boost your conversion rates’ that compel your visitors to take the desired action. 

4. Optimize forms to reduce abandonment

For B2B websites and particularly those looking to nurture leads, forms are a crucial page element. In many cases, every form filled in itself counts as a conversion. This means you must optimize your forms to ensure visitors fill them with utmost ease and do not abandon them midway.

In general, the shorter the form, the better it is. This is because people today do not have the patience to fill lengthy forms. Try to distill your forms as much as possible. Ask for only those details which are of utmost importance to your business to be able to communicate with them. 

Other methods for maximizing your form conversion rate include optimizing your form fields’ dimension, using a single column on your form, and enabling social media sign-up. 

Creating a form that provides the optimal user experience while providing all the necessary information in an easy-to-understand manner will ensure an optimal conversion rate. An excellent example of a complex form that has been laid out to minimize cart abandonment is Victoria’s Secret.

Regardless of how good you feel your design is, it pays to handle how people are using your present forms. For instance, you can try to find out where you’re losing more people in the process of filling them out. Heatmaps are a handy tool in this regard.

You can use Google Analytics to assess ‘conversion leakage’ on forms, or take a deeper look into conversion rates along the customer journey through micro funnel analysis.

Whatever method you use, analyzing your forms can help you pinpoint which parts of the site most visitors reach. If that’s not the end of the form, you’ll know the part of the fill-in process that’s putting people off.

The VWO free trial creation form had multiple fields, which was leading to drop-offs. By making necessary changes, the form is now a single field one making it very easy for people to create a free VWO account and quickly embark on their website optimization journey. Try it out yourself here. 

5. Use videos and other new elements to your advantage

Improving conversion rates, when you get down to it, is about engaging and persuading visitors. Your pages must capture their attention. Then, the pages need to convince them that they want to take the action you need. There are few things more attention-grabbing or persuasive than videos. It’s why they’re used so widely in online marketing.

Many types of marketing videos can help improve your conversion rate marketing. For example, in the case of eCommerce, use product demo videos to increase page time spent. See how Amazon uses videos to demonstrate its products and increases visitor engagement.

A video can speak directly to your target audience. It can help you convey far more information in a shorter time than plain text. Animated GIFs and other engaging elements can also help engage and convert visitors.

Getting your conversion rate marketing right

It’s easy to overcomplicate digital marketing. At its core, it’s about making people aware of your brand and converting them into loyal customers. That’s what makes conversion rate marketing so essential. It’s a process that can help make all your other marketing efforts and online advertising more worthwhile.

Nadia walks us through her thoughts about the X (experience) in UX (user experience) and why it plays a central role in crafting seamless experiences.

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

Here’s a synopsis of this interesting conversation. 

What is experience?

Marketers undertake activities like researching the market, seeking customer feedback, and experimenting, for one main reason – to create the right experiences for users. This is because great experiences lead to frictionless customer journeys and pave the way for higher conversions. 

Tapping on these lines, Nadia begins the session by explaining what is experience and deciphering its importance in the retail industry. According to Nadia, experience is a feeling, and not a habit. When you visit a coffee shop and the barista creates a latte art, that is an experience. The early morning coffee you have everyday from your coffee pot is not, it’s just a habit. She explains that in retail, simply giving your customers access to your products is not enough. You need to go beyond that and create frictionless and seamless experiences for the customers.

What is the role of technology in creating these experiences?

Technology by itself may not lead to creating the right experiences especially when it’s not designed keeping the customer at the centre. Nadia explains this with the example of self-checkout machines. 

The self-checkout machines were launched to reduce in-store dependencies and long checkout queues, especially in the departmental stores. However, the technology failed miserably. Rather than offering convenience, they either were unable to identify items, showed payment errors, or confused customers during the checkout process.

Amazon Go’s ‘Just Walk Out Shopping,’ on the other hand, proved the opposite. Besides promising convenience and creating a smooth checkout process, it ensured an experience that customers wanted to relive frequently.

The best use of technology in retail is to create a smooth transition between online and in-store environments. Nadia explains how you can do so with connected customer profiles, creating contextual moments, and using technology as a bandaid and not a painkiller. 

“Technology is not a bandaid; it’s a painkiller.”

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

What is a great retail experience?

Nadia emphasizes that a great retail experience is about capturing the essence of what you’re selling.

So, how can you do this? You can tell a story, evoke emotions, and build a community.

Narrate a story that sells: One way you can capture the essence is by telling a story. As humans, we are wired for stories, and every brand has one. For instance, at Everlane, transparency is all the story. They want everyone to know where the product they’re buying came from, how it came about, and its impact on the world.

Evoke emotions: Another way to capture the essence is by evoking emotions. For instance, if you sell mattresses, you must convey coziness, sleep, and the like through your in-store and digital properties. 

Build a community: Humans seek to be a part of a community. Apple is a wonderful example of building a sense of community in retail environments with the series of events that take place at Apple stores.

Storytelling, emotion, and community building are the key ingredients to memorable customer experience.

How does the above translate into eCommerce?

Nadia explains how eCommerce is no longer just about convenience and speed. A great eCommerce experience comes from three elements:

1. Inspiration and personalization
2. Recognizing that conversion, even though a key success metric, is a moment in the customer journey and not the final destination
3. Building customer trust

Nadia uses the example of Everlane’s online space to explain the point of building customer trust. Their website shows customers where products are made, and shares everything about the factory and the manufacturing practices used. There is transparency around costs too. 

When you show your customers who you are and how you work, you take the first step toward building trust. And Nadia believes that trust is the first principle of conversion.

Concluding her session, Nadia states that the experience landscape is rapidly evolving, and knowing how to operate amid such volatility is strategically imperative. The sooner you understand your target audience’s basic psyche and decode their definition of experience, the sooner you’ll unlock doors to success.

We hope the webinar enriches your understanding of the importance of building strong customer experiences and spurs creative thinking about the effective ways to overcome challenges in the process. We invite you to share your thoughts and feedback.

You can also watch and register for our webinars here.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

One of the examples of heatmaps can be the visual representation of COVID-19 cases being registered globally. The following map shows the geographic distribution of the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases reported per 100,000 people worldwide. Darker shades of orange denote the most affected countries, and the light yellow hues indicate the opposite.

There are quite a few efficient ways to generate a heatmap, such as using readily available free heatmap generators like VWO’s AI-powered heatmap generator or integrated analytical tools. Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is another great option to explore. Let’s dive right in!

Creating a heatmap in Excel/Google Sheets

When using Excel or Google Sheets, you can either create a heatmap by manually coloring each cell depending on its value or act smartly and enter a formula/function to do all the taxing work for you. We’d suggest you use the latter method to create a heatmap. 

Let’s consider the dataset extracted from the above represented COVID-19 globally registered cases as an example to learn how to create a heatmap using the function—apply “Conditional Formatting.”

Step 1: Enter the data

Enter the necessary data in a new sheet. We entered the data above.

Step 2: Select the data

Select the dataset for which you want to generate a heatmap. In this case, it would be B2 through D19.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Step 3: Use conditional formatting

If you are using Excel, go to “Home,” click on “Conditional Formatting,” and select “Color Scales.” The color scale offers quite a few options for you to choose from to highlight the data.   

In our case, we’ve used the first option where cells with high values are colored in green and ones with low values in red.

If you are using Google Sheets, you will find “Conditional Formatting” under the “Format” option in the menu bar.

Then select “Color Scale” and choose the relevant colors for the midpoint, minpoint, and maxpoint.

Note: Use a color scheme that best matches your data interpretation needs. 

Step 4: Select the color scale

Once you select a color scale, you’ll see a heatmap as shown below:

In this color scale, Google Sheets assign a green color to the cells with the highest values and red to the ones with the lowest values. Meanwhile, the remaining values are assigned colors based on the descending value order showing a gradient of different shades falling between green and red. And there you have it: your beautiful heatmap to analyze visitor experience and get more conversions.

While this was just one of the ways to generate a heatmap using Excel or Google Sheets, you can get as creative as you want to. It also gives you the leverage to drill down and create mapping views of specific data sets as well. However, if you’re planning to create heatmaps to study the performance of your website or particular pages, we’d recommend you to use more robust and integrated tools than Excel, such as VWO heatmaps. They not only help you see how visitors engage with your website but also highlight web elements that catch their attention or distract them. 

Watch the video to get an overview of VWO Heatmaps:

VWO’s free AI-powered heatmap generator allows you to predict how visitors interact with your web page. It enables you to gauge bottlenecks based on user experience for you to take required optimization measures. You can follow your visitors’ trails on your web pages and analyze granularly how they interact with each static or dynamic element. 

To know more about how you can leverage VWO heatmaps to visualize visitor behavior and draw valuable insights, sign up for a free demo session from one of VWO’s optimization experts or opt-in for a free trial to give it a spin yourself and assess whether it meets your unique requirements.

As an eCommerce player, your growth is dependent on conversion rates. Read on to develop an understanding of some crucial factors that drive the eCommerce conversion rates.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

What is eCommerce conversion rate?

The eCommerce conversion rate is the ratio of transactions to sessions, expressed in the form of a percentage. For instance, a ratio of one transaction against every ten sessions would make for an eCommerce conversion rate of 10%.”

Used in conjunction with other critical metrics, conversion rate serves as an excellent barometer to measure the health, performance, and competitiveness of your online store. The higher the conversion rate, the better the customer value proposition and the lower the customer acquisition cost. To make any meaningful improvement in your eCommerce conversion rates, it is important to take an audit of your current conversion rate.

What is the average conversion rate for eCommerce websites?

As per Monetate, the global average eCommerce conversion rate is 2.2% for Q1 of 2023. But, significant conversion rate disparity exists across industries, devices, sources, regions, and the like.  

For instance, the average conversion rate for the health and wellbeing market was 2.8% in March 2023, as compared to 0.8% for the luxury kitchen and home appliances market. As per the report, Great Britain’s eCommerce sector has an average conversion rate of 3.4%, while the corresponding number for the EMEA is 1.1%.

Therefore, it’s important to develop your key eCommerce performance indicators (KPIs) as well as to take into account market-specific nuances while analyzing the average eCommerce conversion rate of your industry.

Similarly, if you’re comparing your eCommerce website’s conversion rate with competitors, be mindful that no two businesses can have the same conversion rate. Several factors come into play – your target audience, geographic areas of business, products or services sold, penetration in the market, and more. As per Recurly, Amazon boasts of a 13% conversion rate, which is nearly 7x the average industry standard. 

eCommerce conversion rate by industry

When drafting in-house goals and benchmarks, referring to market-specific conversion rate standards can prove to be highly valuable, especially to gauge the general and overall performance of eCommerce stores.

IRP Commerce is one of the best sites to study market data. The graph below shows the average eCommerce conversion rates of various industries as of March 2023 and the growth in conversion rate with respect to March 2022.

eCommerce conversion rate by country

When formulating your KPIs, it’s essential to consider benchmark conversion rates of leading commerce countries. The conversion rate you’d expect from Brazil, for instance, will be quite different from that of the US. This difference in average conversion rates is driven by many factors.

1. Mature markets: Mature markets with well-established online brands generally have higher conversion rates, while those where eCommerce is still trying to penetrate and facing stiff competition from brick-and-mortar stores will naturally churn a lower conversion rate.
2. Purchasing power parity (PPP): PPP is one of the primary differentiating factors. Besides a country’s inflation rate, its economic growth rates, consumption pattern, and demographic changes also significantly affect the conversion rate.  
3. Credit card penetration (CCP): The global dynamics behind credit card penetration (CCP) has been quite unpredictable. For instance, in Europe, credit card penetration in the Netherlands is significantly lower than in Nordics, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom.  Hence, the eCommerce conversion rate here ought to be correspondingly different.
4. Logistics and distribution: Not all countries across the globe have the presence of a robust logistics and distribution network. That is why eCommerce businesses in many countries are unable to meet high-velocity demands. This again accounts for a low online store conversion rate in many countries as compared to some others.

Knowing the country-wise conversion rate serves well, especially when you’re planning to expand your market base. This kind of information helps make necessary amendments to your KPIs and prepare foolproof business strategies for sure wins. This is where developing an understanding of your conversion funnels can come in handy.

eCommerce conversion rate by channel/source

Besides the industry and country-specific conversion rates, segregating the eCommerce conversions based on traffic source is important. As per the latest stats gathered from industry-acclaimed statistical sources, except for social media, the conversion rate is between 2-3% for all traffic sources.

Every company, including eCommerce stores, run a series of initiatives to highlight their offerings – either through featured product roundups, guest posting on authoritative sites, social media campaigns, implementing SEO strategies, or running paid ads. The latest statistics show the need for data structuring and aggregation from most analytics tools on a customer data platform, as the highest conversion rate is coming from an unknown source. 

Average eCommerce conversion rate by device

eCommerce conversion rates related to specific devices, typically desktops, smartphones, and tablets, need to be considered when formulating KPIs for generating high conversions. As can be interpreted from the data below, the online store conversion rate for the desktop is approximately 2x as compared to the ones from mobile devices. 

eCommerce conversion rate statistics in 2022-23

• The fastest-growing e-commerce countries based on online sales are the Philippines and India. [Statista]
• Best-performing websites usually showcase the strongest conversion rates of 11.45% and more. [Wordstream]
• In April 2023, the Ecommerce Market witnessed a notable rise in the average conversion rate, which surged by 6.89% from 1.70% to 1.82% when compared to the same period in April 2022. [IRP Commerce]
• 85% of shoppers expressed the importance of product information and pictures when making decisions about which brand or retailer to purchase from. [Think with Google]
• A website that is ranked #1 on Google usually has a click-through rate (CTR) of about 30%. This percentage drops to 20% if the website is ranked third and goes below 2% if it is positioned ninth or below on SERP. [Advanced Web Ranking]
• The baseline eCommerce conversion goal of an online store must be 2%+. [Big Commerce]
• Mobile devices are a much popular choice for in-store price comparisons among users. [Statista]
• One of the primary reasons why people shop online is the ability to shop 24×7. [Drip]
• Industry experts predict that by 2040 nearly 95% of purchases will be eCommerce purchases. [99firms]
• As per a survey in 2022, 54% of respondents utilized search engines to get more information about a product. [Statista]

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

eCommerce conversion rate optimization

A good eCommerce conversion rate is not just an outcome of one-time work. You have to continuously optimize your website to keep the conversion rate above your baseline conversion goal. Here are some ways to do it:

a. Increase the website’s speed

It is to ensure that site visitors don’t drop off just because of the delay in loading the web content. Proven techniques include compressing product images using G-zip, switching to a dedicated server and CDN, utilizing caching plugins on the CMS for HTML and CSS minification, and eliminating render-blocking JavaScript.

b. Analyze visitor behavior

Understand how many visitors are dropping at each stage of the purchase cycle. You can analyze each stage with behavior analytics tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and form analytics to pinpoint the areas of improvement.

c. Experiment with pages with huge visitor drop-offs

Behavior analysis can reveal many insights about weak-performing pages; you can then conduct A/B tests to validate the solution that is based on the analysis.

For example, Perfect Plants, a small business based in North Florida sells plants through its eCommerce store. The team there conducted an A/B test with the hypothesis of repositioning the plant image on the product section for visitors coming via mobile devices. The test ended with a 19.26% increase in the number of clicks on the add-to-cart button. The winning variation had no image on the product page.

Thus, A/B testing creates a website experience that is convenient for visitors, which in turn improves the conversion rate.

d. Personalize the website experience

In a highly competitive environment where companies are vying to attract more customers, personalization is a powerful strategy to keep existing customers engaged. By analyzing data on their past behavior, you can customize various aspects such as product recommendations, headings on landing pages, and additional product options.

Let’s say you have a group of customers who enjoy purchasing discounted items. The next time they visit your website, you can provide them with a special offer code or discount, but with a requirement to spend a certain amount on products. This approach ensures that you cater to their preferences and interests, leading to a higher likelihood of converting their visit into a purchase.

Conclusion

Tracking conversion rates can be quite challenging. For eCommerce, tracking the cart abandonment ratio is critical. Only then one can identify and take corrective actions. 

At VWO, we believe it’s best to adopt a focused approach to eCommerce conversion optimization. Rely on well-researched studies and sources, including Statista and Baymard, or conduct your primary research to define your website conversion rate benchmarks and KPIs. 

Remember, the role of benchmarks is to help you understand the current performance of your online store. They’re not gold standards that can be replicated. A more systematic approach is to run conversion optimization A/B tests and learn what works best for your online store. Such a well-informed approach has the potential to increase your conversion rates by as much as 90%. 

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)